This week saw rumours of the much-talked-about-but-never-seen iPad Mini rear their head again, with Bloomberg sources claiming Apple was readying a smaller, cheaper tablet for late 2012.

According to those in the know, said tiny tablet would help Apple "maintain dominance of the tablet market" in the face competition from devices like the Nexus 7. But is the Nexus 7 really an iPad competitor?

Both the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire are 'content-consumption devices', which is a nice way of saying that neither Google nor Amazon make any money from the hardware. Instead, they hope to generate revenue through on-device sales.

Apple's approach is so lucrative because, as well as reaping a healthy profit from app sales, it also makes a fair portion from the hardware: premium products with premium price tags.

That's not to say that the iPad Mini is an impossibility, but it does seem unlikely that Apple would feel the need to sacrifice its hardware margins to combat such nascent competition.

But that's enough blabbering, so let's swap the waffle for concision as we move on to our bite-sized overview of the last seven days' worth of news.

Platform wars

Mobile publisher Crescent Moon drops its iOS-only status to bring its games to Amazon Appstore.

411 developers have now gained more than 1 million downloads on the Nokia Store for Symbian.

Carriers from around the world have pledged their support for Mozilla's Firefox OS, with Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, and Sprint all backing the HTML5-based project.

Nokia board chairman Risto Siilasmaa has admitted that the company has "a contingency plan" to fall back on should Windows Phone 8 fail.

...Apple claims App Store crashing glitch has been rectified, blaming the problem on a server bug. But the company's claims that only a 'small number of users' were affected don't seem to tally with reports.